I know these types of mods are all over the place, but I just thought this was way cool. An individual calling himself “Lilmuckers” has posted the process he went through to build a mac-mini into the wall of his kitchen. “It is hidden and everything works perfectly.” he says. The Mac mini is pretty small as it is, but I’m all for aesthetics. The less visible and obvious it is, the better. via MacMerc Read more »

Cosmetics aside, this is actually a pretty inventive casemod to add two more hard drives to a G5. I’m guessing there would be heat issues and you’d need a controller card, but if you need more space than the two internal slots offer (I have both of mine filled) and don’t want a stack of external cases on your desk, this is certainly a viable option. Read more »

Great. Now another clone of another iPod, simply named the “IPOD Mini”. While there are slight differences and it has an FM tuner and voice-recorder, it’s again, near identical in form factor and overall design to the iPod mini. The term “supershuffle” was at least some attempt to diverge from the name. But, capital letters? Read more »

I don’t know French, but according to the Babel Fish translation, at IDF 2005, Intel announced a mini PC, strikingly similar to the Mac mini, in size and design. It has a CD/DVD drive, runs Windows XP MCE and uses the Napa platform, the next Centrino. Check out the site for some snapshots. Read more »

In case you were waiting for this, it’s now available for purchase. Oh yeah, and it’s 10% off the $1199 price, so you can get it for just under $1080. Did you hear that? 24 inches of LCD goodness for $1080. The cheapest 23″ or 24″ mammoth I’ve seen exceeds $1600. Let the frenzy begin. Read more »

I’ve got a bit of a dilemma that I’m hoping the ForeverGeek staff and readers can assist me with. For the past 8 years or so, I’ve been running a 21″ CRT as my primary display. I’ve loved it from the day I brought it home and it’s served me well. Acquiring it was a milestone for me, almost on par with getting my dual G5 this time last year. Now it’s time to retire the beast and move to LCD. I’ve considered getting a 20″ or 21″ display, as I like the resolution these sizes offer, but cost aside, I wouldn’t gain any more screen acreage than what I Read more »

If you are one of the perhaps many concerned mini owners, who worry that using a putty knife to open your mini will damage it’s precious aluminum skin, worry no more. This Chinese site has an excellent photo tutorial on how to open your mini, using modified bamboo chopsticks. The softness and tensile strength of the bamboo apparently make the food utensils a great tool for this and from what I can tell from the pictures, there is absolutely no damage to the mini whatsoever. Read the full tutorial if you can (I suppose you could just jump right to the end). There’s a neat mod to the mini at Read more »

No, not by us. X86-Secret, a French hardware site, has reviewed a chip that appears to be the yet unreleased Pentium 630, the successor to the 530. Not much of a speed improvement, but it does have double the cache and 64-bit extensions. If you know French, you can check out the original site, otherwise, head on over to Ars Technica and check out their translation. Read more »

Yes, it’s been done. This guy took his 1.25GHz mini and overclocked it to 1.42GHz. Via four jumpers, the G4′s speed can be selected between four settings: 1.25, 1.42, 1.50 and 1.58GHz. He tried 1.5GHz, but had stability issues. I probably won’t be this bold, as the jumpers are really, really tiny and I wonder if I could even get 1.58GHz out of my faster G4 (it wouldn’t be worth it for just 1.5GHz). Maybe when the warranty runs out and I dramatically improve my SMT soldering skills… Read more »

Smaller than the Virginia Tech and the massive US Army clusters, this is still an impressive implementation. While it doesn’t appear that they are aiming to compete in the super-computer realm, they have put together a powerful system. These are dual 2GHz G5s, so that’s 1280 processors and each Xserve has 4GB of RAM. There is one thing that this cluster has that I believe wasn’t available in the VT cluster: The Turing Cluster is available to students and faculty for school-related projects. The school’s Usage Policies specify that “the cluster is to be used for scientific and engineering computational jobs only; no other work is allowed.” In addition, sponsors Read more »